Sigma-Aldrich Announces Collaboration With Metahelix Lif...( Partnership to provide expertise...)

Partnership to provide expertise and applications support in plant

biotechnology

ST. LOUIS, July 8 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Sigma-Aldrich (Nasdaq: SIAL) and Metahelix Life Sciences today announced a partnership under which Metahelix will assist in developing applications data for Sigma-Aldrich's plant bioscience product line, and provide expert technological guidance regarding usage. The efforts of this collaboration will occur in Metahelix's existing facility, located adjacent to Sigma-Aldrich's manufacturing and distribution center in Bangalore, India, and provide support for Sigma-Aldrich customers throughout the Pacific Rim and Latin America.

"The plant biotechnology market is growing rapidly in Latin America and Asia as biofuels and the rapid expansion of urban centers drives increased demand for higher productivity crops," said Susan Riley, director of international business at Sigma-Aldrich. "This partnership with Metahelix is expected to enable us to support our customers with practical guidance by a firm that works with a number of different species of plants."

Guatham Nadig, head of research and development at Metahelix, said: "Metahelix will benefit from visibility of new tools available to develop our commercial offerings in the plant bioscience area."

Sigma-Aldrich serves the plant biotechnology research market with a variety of genomic and proteomic solutions, including whole genome amplification and RNA purification kits (http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/plant). The Company's leading Extract-N-Amp(TM) plant PCR technology dramatically reduces the amount of time required to extract and amplify genomic DNA from plant tissue, facilitating rapid screening. Sigma-Aldrich's SpyLine(TM) plant mRNA capture kits allow for the isolation of mRNA and performance of RT-PCR in a single 96-well PCR plate incorporating Oligo (dT) primers, eli
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